15 May VTeX at TeX users’ group annual meeting 2017

From April 29th until May 3rd representatives from VTeX company participated in TeX users’ group annual meeting at BachoTeX conference. These events are a perfect place to share the latest information about innovative ideas regarding TeX. Most of the participants of the conference are LaTeX experts and many of them work with solutions that can be applied to the publishing industry.

This year there were two presentations given by VTeX employees. Both presentations drew the audience’s attention and raised interesting discussions afterwards. The first presentation was about authors’ habits using TeX for writing the scientific content. As it might not be well known, typesetters always balance on the thin line between indefinite authors’ creativity and strict publishers’ requirements to produce full-text XML. TeX is designed to offer wide capabilities to achieve the desired goals in many ways.

There is a huge collection of TeX packages, created over the years. We presented statistics about which TeX packages are commonly used for preparing the scientific content and what part of them comes from the standard sources. We gave insights on authors’ habits using TeX, provided some interesting examples and discussed how and why these habits are important for typesetters while preparing manuscripts for publishing.

The second presentation was about extensions to the dvips program. One extension allows flexible inclusion of bitmap images and was implemented on base of FreeImage library. Another extension solves a quite long-standing task – adds OpenType font support to dvips. These LaTeX packages will soon be placed as Open source, freely available to all TeX users.

We were happy being able to share our thoughts with TeX community and we received valuable comments from experts towards our achievements. This year it was the 10th time we have participated at BachoTeX conference and we are sure we will come back to further BachoTeX conferences. We also will keep on participating at TeX users’ group annual meetings.